LogFAQs > #958422819

1) Aliens. The universe is such a massive place that intelligent life has to have evolved somewhere else. However, the chance that we've been visited by them here in FTL spaceships is very low, Earth is just one planet out of innumerable ones out there, and everything we currently understand about physics indicates that interstellar travel would require extremely immense amounts of energy. Even if there was a highly advanced civilization out there that had the capability to accomplish that, the resource cost of traveling to another planet would mandate a damn good reason for them to visit it.

2) Ghosts. It's such a widely reported phenomenon over all of written history that there has to be something to it, especially the numerous sightings that occur in particular places. It's probably not the actual souls of the dead, but instead some kind of energetic anomaly that affects certain people's brains and causes them to see things that aren't there. I've personally never seen a ghost or the activities of one, but I've been a few places that gave me an inexplicable spooky feeling.

3) Zombies. Many posters here have pointed out that such a thing does exist in the insect world. You'll never see a rotten corpse shambling down the street, however, the process of decomposition would render the muscles inoperative long before then, let alone all of the organs that provide the necessary energy and oxygen for those muscles to work. Theoretically, something like a cordyceps fungus could reanimate a freshly dead human, but our nervous system is much more complex than an insect.

4) Bigfoot. An upright bipedal simian of that size is unlikely to exist, humans with gigantism in that size range usually suffer their entire lives with significant medical problems. It's well known that Andre the Giant drank so much because it was the only way he could deal with his back pain caused by his enormous size. Other giants often have heart problems because of the amount of work it takes to circulate blood through a body of that size. A new species could have evolved solutions to those problems, but we'd have found at least skeletal remains from them were that the case. Upright hominid anatomy just doesn't scale up well beyond normal human size.

5) Nessie. Creatures like that did exist millions of years ago, but conditions on Earth have changed significantly since then. Megalodons couldn't even survive in todays oceans, let alone something like the Loch Ness monster in a lake. Just the amount of food it would require alone would be far more than what Loch Ness could provide it.

6) Mermaids. Completely fantastic, would require a very bizarre evolutionary branch from the earliest hominids.

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